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He said: “We were not expecting same day, but only a couple of days or a week for it to be taken and collected.

“It is a council car park and the council should be clearing it up. I know that the sofa should not be dumped there but it also shouldn’t be just left there.”

A fridge freezer also turned up on the Scotia Road land

Charles had even offered to arrange for the problematic sofa to be taken away and then invoice the council. An offer that was reportedly turned down. He said: “We chose Tunstall because we like the area and the main streets are maintained – but not this car park.”

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“There is a lot of items that get dumped there and they should be collected and taken away because we pay our council tax,” Charles said. “The car park is used by the market traders and customers.

“We deal with a lot of vulnerable people and children who should not have to walk through a car park like that.”

As the ‘battle’ to have the sofa taken away continued one member of staff at Gateway penned a poem about it. They wrote: “Abandoned, rejected, increasingly tattered; It was clear that poor sofa to nobody mattered. But over the months a strange ‘battle’ evolved; With the sofa the pawn in a ‘game’ unresolved.”

After five months the city council has taken away the dumped items.

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A spokesman for the local authority said: “We take a zero-tolerance approach to fly-tipping and environmental crime. Last year we dealt with more than 8,000 incidents, the majority of which we discovered and cleaned up pro-actively before they had been reported to us by the public.

"Our average response time to clearing up fly-tipping from the moment it is reported to us is currently under two days.

“Unfortunately on this occasion we have fallen short of the high standards we set ourselves due to an administrative error and we apologise for that. The waste has since been removed from the site.”

An extract from ‘The travails and trivial travels of an abandoned sofa’ – in the style of Dr Seuss…